1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to techniques for content delivery.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known in the art for a content provider to outsource its content delivery requirements to a content delivery network (a “CDN”). A content delivery network is a collection of content servers and associated control mechanisms that offload work from Web site origin servers by delivering content on their behalf to end users. A well-managed CDN achieves this goal by serving some or all of the contents of a site's Web pages, thereby reducing the customer's infrastructure costs while enhancing an end user's browsing experience from the site. For optimal performance, the CDN service provider may maintain an objective, detailed, real-time view of the Internet's topology, reliability, and latency, and this view may then be used to power a dynamic DNS-based system to direct end users to the best CDN server to handle a particular request.
In some known content delivery networks, DNS canonical names (CNAMEs) are sometimes used to provide a level of indirection between customer hostnames and CDN service provider-specific information used to enable the service for the customer. To give a concrete example, for customer domain “www.customer.com,” the CDN service provider may create a CNAME like “www.customer.com.edgeservice.net CNAME g.cdnsp.net”. The customer would then create a CNAME for its domain name into the service.net domain, such as: “www.customer.com CNAME www.customer.com.edgeservice.net”. Known methods for provisioning CNAMEs are either highly manual or are not monitored and prone to problems. Customers are unable to provision their own CNAMEs and typically must rely on professional services consultants, who must then create the CNAMEs by hand-editing files or other, inefficient means.